FILE - In this Sept. 1 2021 record photo, Pope Francis arrives for his play wide assemblage successful the Paul VI hall, astatine the Vatican. On Saturday, Sept. 18, 2021 Pope Francis issued a video connection to Central and Eastern European bishops urging them to perceive to survivors of clergy intersexual maltreatment and see them partners successful reforming the Catholic Church, informing that their nonaccomplishment to bash truthful risks its precise future. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, file)

FILE - In this Sept. 1 2021 record photo, Pope Francis arrives for his play wide assemblage successful the Paul VI hall, astatine the Vatican. On Saturday, Sept. 18, 2021 Pope Francis issued a video connection to Central and Eastern European bishops urging them to perceive to survivors of clergy intersexual maltreatment and see them partners successful reforming the Catholic Church, informing that their nonaccomplishment to bash truthful risks its precise future. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, file) (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

ROME – Pope Francis urged European bishops connected Saturday to perceive to survivors of clergy intersexual maltreatment and see them partners successful reform, informing that their nonaccomplishment to bash truthful risks the precise aboriginal of the Catholic Church.

Francis issued a videomessage to Central and Eastern European bishops who are gathering successful Poland starting connected Sunday for a four-day kid extortion league organized by the bishops’ league and the Vatican’s kid extortion advisory commission.

The determination is significant, fixed astir a twelve existent and retired Polish bishops person been sanctioned by the Vatican successful caller months for their repeated failures to perceive to victims and instrumentality enactment to authorisation the priests who raped and molested them.

“Only by confronting the information of this cruel behaviour and humbly seeking forgiveness from victims and survivors tin the religion find the mode to erstwhile again beryllium considered and trusted arsenic a spot of invited and information for those who request it,” Francis said.

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He said bishops successful peculiar indispensable beryllium the archetypal to perceive to victims, not the last, and indispensable beryllium astatine their work “seeing them arsenic companions and protagonists of a communal future.”

Victims person agelong said they were treated arsenic enemies of the religion erstwhile they reported their abuse, accused of seeking to origin ungraded oregon extort the hierarchy for money, adjacent though galore often said they simply came guardant to forestall a predator clergyman from harming others. Francis, and earlier him Benedict XVI, person denounced what they called the hierarchy's misplaced interest for the church's estimation implicit the needs of victims.

In the videomessage, Francis said words of sorrow had to beryllium converted into factual enactment of betterment to forestall maltreatment and perceive to victims, saying “these important discussions genuinely interaction the aboriginal of the church.”

Francis has passed caller religion authorities to effort to clasp bishops accountable for covering up for abuse, responding to decades of complaints from victims and their advocates that the Vatican turned a unsighted oculus to bishops who failed to support their flocks.

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The Argentine Jesuit himself had a steep learning curve connected the issue, aft helium botched a notorious lawsuit of maltreatment and cover-up successful Chile. Francis did an about-face and apologized, and convened the presidents of each nationalist bishops league successful 2019 to effort to sensitize them to the value of the contented for the church’s credibility.

Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This worldly whitethorn not beryllium published, broadcast, rewritten oregon redistributed without permission.